I've Been Busy: An Update

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

I thought it was a good time to update you all on where I'm at in my career, what projects I'm working on, and my life in general.

I recently started a new job about 3 months ago today. I am doing SharePoint development for a Pharmaceutical research company, and am loving it. I have great bosses, am confronted with new challenges daily, and it is giving me the opportunity to really apply many of my talents that I have across the board with a number of different technologies. That being said there is still much more to learn but I enjoy learning, and thrive on the "newness" of each day.

I have also been very busy on a few contracting side-projects, or moonlighting, if you will. I have been helping out with a friend's mom for her website regarding good health coaching, doing her web development at goodhealthcoaching.com.

Through GHC, I also made a great new contact in Katrina Costedio Design. I have been very busy helping her with some of her backend development and database design through a number of different projects, the main one for the time being that was just launched being obrienorganics.com. Katrina is a great person to work with, and I think that I will see a lot of great projects between the two of us in the future.

Other then that, I have been busy with a number of side projects, none of which have yet to be released, but I intend to do so shortly. I can't tell you about all of them, because I might have to kill you, but those that I can I will talk about below.

SharePoint Browser: A "developer" front end for developing against SharePoint. This is nearly complete and I intend to release the first version in the coming weeks. This is basically a quick and dirty way for developers to browse SharePoint sites, view XML schema from those services, and best of all, it doesn't have to run on the server itself!

Pluggable Scheduler: That isn't the real name, but that is the best description I can think of. This is a windows service that I will use to generically create "continuous" services that will run on a scheduled basis. No more writing custom applications and windows services for each task. Some example tasks might be backing something up, monitoring websites for uptime, and there are many more. This will have an architecture that allows me to drop and XML configuration file, drop a module with an inherited interface, and have it work out of the box. Some things that are done already: Integrated logging across the board, scheduling down to the second, a number of overridable events and much more.

I think that is all for now, I'll keep you all posted as things change.